To be fair, when Jason Gross was sharing confidential information from his perch at the New York Fed with his friend at Goldman Sachs, he did say that the documents were not to be passed around the bank, and were for Rohit Bansal's eyes only. Unfortunately, he didn't stress that point hard enough, so what Bansal heard was "Do whatever you want with these but, like, be cool about it. Maybe even send them to your bosses, making sure to note exactly where they came from."

An ex-employee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suspected of leaking confidential information to a former colleague working at Goldman Sachs Group Inc pleaded guilty to a federal charge on Wednesday. Jason Gross, 37, appeared in federal court in Manhattan and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of theft of government property, days after Goldman Sachs reached a related $50 million settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services...Gross and Bansal were former colleagues at the New York Fed. Bansal later joined Goldman Sachs in July 2014. While at Goldman, Bansal obtained confidential information including 35 documents on 20 occasions from Gross, according to New York banking regulators. Those documents included some pertaining to examinations of a bank that Goldman was advising about a potential transaction, regulators said. Bansal on several occasions shared the information with senior Goldman personnel, at times writing in emails that the documents were highly confidential and directing the recipients, "Please don't distribute," the regulators said.